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Jerry Feldman wrote: > There was some discussion at the last meeting regarding Virtual box > 1. http://virtualbox.org/ I missed that reference, but coincidentally read an article yesterday in the latest Linux Journal on VirtualBox. Another article on it here: Virtualbox on 64-bit Ubuntu works like a charm http://www.linux.com/feature/115209 and as usual there's a decent overview at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox and you can see how it compares to other virtualization solutions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines A notable difference from some of the other (newer) virtualization solutions is that it does not require virtualization support in the CPU, so you can run it on old hardware. > 2. Virtual Box is a fully GPL'd virtualization product... There's a GPL version and a proprietary version, which has additional features. The proprietary version is free for personal use. The major differences are that the proprietary version has (from Wikipedia): * built-in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server. * USB support and support of remote USB devices (via RDP). * iSCSI support for virtual hard disks. > ...can you run an application under the guest os that shows up as a > separate Window under Linux. I wondered about that as well, and the answer seems vague, but I get the impression that if you install the Guest Additions (virtualization aware drivers for the guest OS), it might be possible. For example, Wikipedia says: As a graphics adapter, by default, VirtualBox virtualizes a standard VESA card with 8 MB RAM, which can be adjusted. With the Guest Additions (for Windows or Linux guests) comes a special video driver that allows for better performance and features such as dynamically adjusting the guest resolution when the VM window is resized. It may also be possible to accomplish this using RDP. > ...can you get to the guest's virtual drives from the host os. The > answer is no since the disks are vurtualized within each VM, but... The proprietary version will do this using iSCSI. As you mentioned, you could do this with either version using NFS, SAMBA, etc. As far as among guests, the Linux Journal article mentioned that the virtual drives could be marked as sharable. If the host access is happening when the VM is shut down, you can probably use a dedicated partition on a real disk, rather than a virtual disk, and thus avoid the specialized virtual disk format. -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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